Wireless mobile networks are useful in many situations where network infrastructure either does not exist or cannot be trusted. Examples include military operations, disaster relief, and temporary offices. A packet radio network (or ad hoc network) is a type of wireless mobile network that typically uses radio frequency (RF) transceivers to send and receive data.
Radio transceivers are major energy consumers in wireless mobile network systems. This is mainly due to the fact that the radio transceivers are typically powered on at all times and are constantly consuming energy, even when data is not being transmitted or received. A Fundamental advancements to increase battery capacity and/or reduce transceiver power requirements are not expected in the near future. Therefore, energy-conserving techniques are the main avenue for extending system life.
Most conventional energy-conservation techniques for wireless mobile networks predominantly focus on minimizing the transmit power and performing certain routing operations and not on simply powering up or down the radio transceivers, which, as set forth above, are the major energy consumers. The current techniques that specifically address radio transceiver energy consumption are designed for centralized base station based networks (usually employing time division multiple access (TDMA)) where communication is scheduled and inactivity periods are predetermined, allowing nodes to switch off their transceivers and conserve energy. These techniques cannot be employed in decentralized, wireless mobile networks, however, because communication is unscheduled and turning off the transceiver may result in an unacceptable number of packets being lost.
Therefore, there exists a need for systems and methods for conserving energy in decentralized, wireless mobile networks.